San Francisco’s main immigration court building is set to close at 100 Montgomery St.
Lea Suzuki/S.F. Chronicle
The Trump administration shuttered the Bay Area’s largest immigration court Friday, a move that’s almost certain to worsen the nationwide backlog of asylum cases.
The San Francisco immigration court at 100 Montgomery St, one of two in the city, had more than 120,000 pending cases. It was the site of numerous ICE arrests and anti-ICE protests since President Donald Trump took office, including one incident captured on video where a protester was dragged by an ICE vehicle.
Those cases will now largely shift to a court in Concord that was created two years ago to help deal with backlogs in the San Francisco courts, which heard cases across Northern California. The Concord court itself is short staffed, with only five judges despite the Department of Justice stating it intended to hire 21 when the court first opened, and a backlog of 60,000 cases as of December.
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A smaller San Francisco court at 630 Sansome St. with two judges that hears the cases of people held in ICE detention will remain in operation.
The early closure of the 100 Montgomery court, which was expected later this year, will further slow asylum claims and other appeals for immigration benefits from people in deportation proceedings.
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The Department of Justice stated in a press release that the closure was based on cost-effectiveness — the court rented a space in a Financial District skyscraper — but former immigration judges have criticized the Trump administration for what they called “dismantling” of due process for immigrants.
The San Francisco court came under attack last year when the Trump administration started firing one judge after another, part of an unprecedented wave of nationwide terminations of immigration judges. By Thanksgiving, more than half of the court’s 21 judges had been fired. The judges are employees of the Department of Justice’s Executive Office of Immigration Review.
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“This is an attempt to subvert the rule of law as it pertains to asylum,” former immigration judge Shira Levine, who was fired in September, told the Chronicle. She now serves as deputy legal director at the Immigration Institute of the Bay Area.
Shuting Chen, who was fired in November in the middle of hearing an asylum seeker’s case, said the closure of the San Francisco court was “retaliation” against a court that had one of the highest asylum grant rates nationwide.
Former judges said they followed the rule of law in making each asylum decision. The court also had one of the highest rates of attorney representation for asylum seekers in the country, which research has shown is correlated with a higher success rate.
After judges were fired en masse, the share of cases heard in San Francisco that resulted in a deportation order jumped up, a previous Chronicle analysis found.
“It’s pretty transparent that the firing of so many immigration judges in San Francisco and closure of the court at 100 Montgomery is an attempt to silence a group of people that the administration found it could not rein in,” Chen said. “It’s the administration’s attempt to root out all its enemies and implement its agenda without any pushback.”
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Chen said the firings and closure have caused “chaos” in court administration. Last week, she said, an attorney told her that their client had been assigned to Chen’s docket for a hearing in 2027, despite Chen having been fired 6 months ago.
Milli Atkinson, who ran the San Francisco Bar Association’s program providing free legal representation to people in the city’s immigration court, said the court closure will mean asylum seekers, many of whom have already waited years for their claims to be heard, will have to wait years longer.
“They just don’t have the judges for it,” Atkinson said. “The struggle for people is having their case heard. You have to pay experts, attorneys and at the last minute everything gets cancelled, and you have to start all over again.”
Meanwhile, she said, people cannot plan for the future and are at risk of being detained and deported. The Trump administration has detained numerous people with pending immigration court cases and pressured them to “self-deport” rather than face difficult detention conditions.
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Lisa Knox, co-executive director of the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice, argued that the closures of the San Francisco court is meant to speed up deportations. Knox’s organization helps to run the Legal Empowerment Initiative out of the Concord court, which helps people facing deportation who don’t have a lawyer.
“The closure of the San Francisco immigration court and the consolidation of cases in Concord is intended to cause disruption and accelerate deportations,” Knox said.